Blu-ray, DVD Release: The Complete Lady Snowblood

By
Laurence
– October 20, 2015Find Others: Blu-ray, DVD, Movie, New Release, NewsGet More: , ,

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Jan. 5, 2015
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion

Toshiya Fujita’s pair of influential cult classics Lady Snowblood (1973) and Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance (1974) set in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan, respectively, are bloody, beautiful extravaganzas composed of one elegant widescreen composition after another.

Meiko Kaji is Lady Snowblood

Meiko Kaji is Lady Snowblood

In the films, a young woman (Meiko Kaji), trained from childhood as an assassin and hell-bent on revenge for her father’s murder and her mother’s rape, hacks and slashes her way to gory satisfaction.

The first Lady Snowblood was a major inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill saga. Both of Fujita’s films are rampant with inventive violence and spectacularly choreographed swordplay and they remain cornerstones of Asian action cinema.

Presented in Japanese with English subtitles, Criterion’s Blu-ray and DVD editions of the film contain the following:

  • New 2K digital restorations of both films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-rays
    • New interviews with Kazuo Koike, the writer of the manga on which the films are based, and screenwriter Norio Osada
    • Trailers
    • New English subtitle translations
    • An essay by critic Howard Hampton
Buy or Rent The Complete Lady Snowblood
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  4. Blu-ray Release: The Sword of Doom
  5. Blu-ray, DVD Release: Lone Wolf and Cub

About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.